Ms. Zuccala called a junior’s name. Addison walked over to Delilah, hugged her, and whispered to her. Addison very deliberately did not look at me. I should have approached them and hugged them both. But I knew Addison had not forgotten the three-baton fiasco. When she was in this mood, she would stare at me coldly and turn her back on me.
Luckily, the stress of the majorette announcements would be over in the next ten seconds. The girls whose names hadn’t been called made fists and squeezed their eyes shut like they had a chance of making the squad, even though the alphabetical order had already passed them over. Didn’t they realize this? The last girl called had been an S. There were only two people left in the room who could possibly make the squad: Charlene Tandekar and—
“Gemma Van Cleve,” Ms. Zuccala announced.
I froze. Was she still calling out the names of the girls who’d made the line? Or had I been daydreaming, and she’d moved on to the names of the Losers?
Bodies jostled me from all sides. People were jumping up and down and hugging me, I realized after a few panicked seconds. I pasted my majorette grin on my face and hugged them back. I might even have managed a squeal. I was a majorette now. My brain told me I should be happy, but all I felt was numb.
Several of the girls who hadn’t made it burst out of Ms. Zuccala’s office to have a dramatic cry. The more gracious losers congratulated the new majorettes. Through the bustle, Addison snuck between girls and finally reached me. She threw her arms around me and hugged me hard enough to hurt. Then she whispered in my ear, “I’m so glad you made it. Now you can vote for me for head majorette.” She held me at arm’s length. “Our moms are going to be so happy! We’re majorettes together, just like they were!”
“Yeah,” I managed. Addison’s mom would be ecstatic. I wasn’t sure my mom really cared, but she would act politely cheerful. Maybe my dad would be happy for me. I would call him to tell him the news, but sometimes he didn’t return my calls for a month, and he usually called back during school when he must know my ringer was off.
Addison was definitely happy. She would be voted head majorette for our senior year. The only other choices were Delilah, who was too nervous, and me.
I was not the type to be head majorette. I was not the type to be a majorette at all. Slowly my brain was processing what had happened to me. The school had chosen me for my talent, despite the purple streaks in my hair and my weight. I should be happy. Instead, I worried that being a majorette with Addison would provide her with new ways to torture me.
The final bell rang. I caught Delilah on her way out of Ms. Zuccala’s office, overcame my natural disinclination to hugging, and gave her the big squeeze she deserved. As Addison and I jogged down the front stairs, into the bright spring afternoon, and walked down the hill to her car, all these kids I knew only vaguely or had never noticed before in my life waved to me as I passed and congratulated me. The third time this happened, Addison stomped her foot and protested, “I made majorette too!” I hoped for Addison’s sake that they hadn’t heard her.
My cell phone beeped with a text message. I only got texts from Addison, who was walking a few steps ahead of me, white fists squeezing the life out of her batons, and who obviously did not have her thumbs on her phone. And from Robert.
I stopped and dug out my phone. Robert had changed his mind, right? He was proud of me, and he’d convinced the rest of our band friends to be proud of me too. I clicked to his message.
You sold out.
There in the warm sunlight, I went cold, except for my cheeks, which felt like they were flaming hot.
Realizing I was not following her, Addison walked back to where I stood. She peered over my shoulder at the message.
“I guess he doesn’t want to be friends anymore,” I said, trying to sound like I didn’t care.
“He’s such an ass.” Addison had always hated Robert. “If he did want to be your friend, you’d be insane to be his.”
Addison was never right about anything. But I had to admit, at least silently to myself, that she’d hit on the truth this time. Robert knew I didn’t want to be a majorette, but he also knew the tryout was important to me, if only for warped reasons. We’d been friends for two years. We’d sat together on every band trip when Addison was with her boyfriend of the week and Robert’s younger girlfriend wasn’t around. I had achieved something, and he owed me more than an insult.
Thinking about this, I realized that I had achieved something. Addison was looking over my shoulder, interested in my social life, rather than the other way around. That had never happened before. Never, in the six years we had been best friends. Now that I was a majorette (I was a majorette! So weird!), I might actually get a social life. Every majorette at my school had one—a real one that included boyfriends, not just unrequited crushes.
But I would need to fight for mine. For the first time ever, I was enjoying some mediocre level of social acceptance. Unless I took immediate action, I would lose my newly favorable position at my school when my fat roll was exposed to the world. Every week this fall, I would be forced to wear a skintight sequined leotard on a football field in front of the entire student body and thousands more people packing the stadium. I was determined not to be the comic relief.
I would have to lose more weight.
2
August
I saw him first, before Addison did. He was tall, slender, and Asian, and he kicked the football with the same purpose and economy of motion I tried for when I twirled batons. Every muscle in his body and every thought in his head focused on punting that ball perfectly across the football stadium. After his leg followed through with the powerful kick, he landed on the grass and watched the ball as it sailed through the goalposts, yet another score.
Then he turned around again and his dark eyes met mine again. The first time this had happened, I had assumed I was imagining things. Boys did not look at me. They saw through me. He must have been looking at some statuesque majorette behind me. When he huddled with his coach, I actually turned to see what he had been looking at on our end of the field. A hundred girls twirled thumb-flips in unison. I was on the end of the front row, and nobody stood directly behind me. He must have been looking at Addison beside me, then. But if he were, the tilt of his head would have been different, I thought. He really did seem to be looking at me.
Over and over.
This was the third and final day of majorette camp for Addison and me. The camp was taught by college majorettes and feature twirlers and was held on the campus of Georgia Tech. I’d had some idea that we might pass hot college guys walking back and forth between the gym and the caf. I would never have talked to them. I was not Addison. But I wanted to look like I could have talked to them. Keeping up my personal style was a challenge now that I’d lost almost fifty pounds in nine months. Even my Courtney Love T-shirt had gotten so big that it flowed around me like a muumuu. I could only wear it by safety-pinning a pleat into the back of it, which was getting uncomfortable.
I hadn’t had a lot of time to go shopping, because I’d spent pretty much my whole summer teaching little girls at the dance studio, then rehearsing with the marching band. And honestly, new clothes hadn’t been a big concern of mine until now. I never noticed my old clothes didn’t fit anymore until I put them on and they fell off. I had no choice but to replace my shorts, because I couldn’t be dropping my pants in public. But I didn’t want to buy a lot of new tops yet. I had plenty of money from my allowance and working at the dance studio. I was just afraid that if I bought clothes, I would stay that size. I was not finished losing weight.
So the first day at camp, I wore one of my few shirts that fit. The second day, I wore the other. By day three I’d figured out that camp was held entirely in a gym set apart from campus foot traffic. All the cute college nerds had gone home for the summer anyway. Besides, I was out of clean laundry. I wore my MARCHING WILDCATS T-shirt, which fit because we’d turned in our sizes only a few weeks before.
Of course on this day, the instructors decided to move us to the huge football stadium for the afternoon so we could get a taste of what twirling would be like if we tried out for a college majorette line. And while high school majorette camp was going on at one end of the stadium, high school football camp was going on at the other.
But with this guy staring across the football field at me (I hoped), I was glad for once that I was not dressed with my usual edge. My MARCHING WILDCATS T-shirt could have passed for band geekdom or, wonder of wonders, school spirit. And in certain circles, the purple streaks in my hair, which I was wearing in two low ponytails down my back to combat the August heat, could have been misconstrued as fashionable.
Was he really looking at me? Nothing would come of it, of course. He wasn’t from my high school. He could be from one of countless other high schools in Atlanta or from a tiny town hours away. I would never see him again after the camp session ended in a few minutes. In the meantime, it was nice to dream.
A group of twenty hulking quarterbacks passed footballs to one another. They threw balls down the field in a hailstorm of pigskin. They ran complicated formations that the coach halted every few seconds, before they could fully execute them, which must have been frustrating.
My guy was in a different group. Each player had a tall, slender kicker’s body. The coach of this group talked more. He explained with his hands, and from the looks of it, whatever he was telling them involved astrophysics. Each time his lecture ended, the boys would line up to kick the ball through the goalposts. Whether I was doing thumb-flips or one-turns, I made sure I watched my guy, from his step up to the tee to the follow-through of his kick.
His legs were long and muscular. His shirt stuck to his chest with sweat. His longish hair bounced as he ran up to the ball and punted it. The coach would talk to him after each turn, pointing down the field. But from my lay-chick’s point of view, this boy did not need camp. He put the ball through the uprights every time.
And then he turned around to see if I was watching. I couldn’t tell at that distance whether he was hot. But his stare showed that he unabashedly appreciated the movements of girls—or, just possibly, this girl. That was hot.
The football camp ended with one last pep talk. The kickers gathered around their coach, and the quarterbacks gathered around theirs. Occasionally the coaches’ voices rang so loudly against the stadium seats that I could hear them over my own instructor counting thumb-flips. Soon the kickers shouted “Break!” and moseyed off the field.
But not my guy. He stood on the sideline and watched the quarterbacks like he was waiting for one of them. Finally the quarterbacks shouted “Break!” and a towering blond guy headed for my guy. I knew the blond was huge because my guy had seemed tall before, half a head above his coach, but the blond was another half a head above him, and almost twice as wide. They stood together by the exit that the other players had taken out of the stadium. My guy said something to the blond. They both turned and looked at me.
My heart sped up, even faster than it had each time my guy had caught my eye.
While they talked, they nonchalantly crossed their arms and pulled up the sides of their shirts to reveal hard six-pack abs like nothing I had ever seen in real life, possibly because I still, out of habit, avoided the community pool.
As if in slow motion, they exposed their muscular chests.
Triceps flexing, they pulled the shirts over their heads.
They stood there, chatting, wiping their faces and chests with the cloth. Admittedly, I had never played sports, and I did not hang out where the athletic boys hung out, so maybe I was misreading the entire situation. But it sure looked to me like the high school football player’s striptease. I enjoyed it way more than I meant to. I started to feel like a stereotypical guy gawking at girls and accidentally running his car into a pond.
They both pulled clean T-shirts from the mesh bags at their feet and shrugged them on. But they hung around. And I could have sworn that every few seconds, my guy still glanced over at me.
“Check out those hotties,” Addison said to me out of the corner of her mouth. I stole a look at her between thumb-flips. She nodded toward the guys. “When this slave driver finally lets us out of camp, run with me over to those boys, so we can stake our claim before the rest of these desperate females.”
Hanging out with Addison was always dramatic. I considered myself to be an intelligent, reasonable person who had seen more than my share of teen girl hysteria, because of her.
“Normally, if I saw strangers staring at me, I would run right over and introduce myself,” I said. “But I’m not convinced they’re staring at me. They could be watching any of these girls.”
“They’re not staring at you,” Addison said. “They’re staring at me.” Her thumb-flips grew larger like she was trying to get the boys’ attention. I moved away from her so I wouldn’t get hit. On my other side, some football equipment on the sidelines was in my airspace—a sled with man-shaped pads that linebackers pushed down the field. I edged back toward Addison.
“If these boys want to stare at me,” she went on, “I’m there.” On there she spun an extra-hard thumb-flip—so hard that it flew straight at me and dinged me on the nose. The blond guy pointed and laughed. My guy took a step forward, almost as if the baton strike were life-threatening and he was going to run to my aid.
The tip of the baton was made of rubber, so it didn’t hurt too much at first. But in the next split second, the shock hit me. I dropped my baton, covered my nose with both hands, and aarghed at the pain.
I used to have the cutest little nose. Then, one day when I was eleven, I was driving a go-cart around my mom’s yard with Addison in the passenger seat. Addison decided it was her turn to drive, jerked the steering wheel out of my hands, and ran us into a tree. The steering wheel broke my nose. When the swelling went down, I had a bump. My mom offered to get me plastic surgery this summer to fix it—“You will look so much better, and feel better about yourself, you’ll see”—but no way was I going under a knife just for looks.